Design a URL Shortener
bit.ly at scale: turn long URLs into short codes, redirect in milliseconds from anywhere, count the clicks.
Walk through a strong candidate's answer to a real system design interview, turn by turn, as the whiteboard fills in. Stop anywhere and ask the coach why. Then take the same question as a 45-minute mock with an AI interviewer that probes what you say and what you draw.
No sign-up. No credit card. Start in one click.
Say 100 million new links a month, and 10 billion redirects.
A whiteboard, the conversation between interviewer and candidate, and a coach beside it. First you walk through it, then you sit it.
A real system design question, opened the way a real interviewer opens it: the problem in two sentences, then "where would you like to start?"
Clarifying questions, requirements with numbers, estimates, the API, then the design, drawn on the whiteboard as they talk, one bottleneck at a time. You press Next for each turn.
Which database? How do you generate the codes? 301 or 302? The walkthrough pauses and asks what you would say, then shows what the candidate said.
Why Postgres and not Cassandra? What is request coalescing? Would my idea work? The coach sees the interview and the whiteboard where you are, and answers there and then.
The same question as a mock interview: an AI interviewer asks, probes what you say and what you draw, and debriefs you, stage by stage, against the walkthrough you went through.
Every question comes three ways: a walkthrough to go through, a mock interview to sit, and a full written reference design to read.
bit.ly at scale: turn long URLs into short codes, redirect in milliseconds from anywhere, count the clicks.
Real-time team messaging: channels, DMs, presence, history and search for millions of concurrent users.
Accept card payments for an e-commerce platform, move money correctly exactly once, and be able to prove it.
The home timeline of Twitter, Instagram or Facebook: posts from people you follow, ranked, fresh, and fast for hundreds of millions of users.
Upload, transcode, and stream video to a billion viewers: a processing pipeline on one side, a CDN problem on the other.
Map tiles, place search, turn-by-turn routing with live traffic, and ETAs for a billion users.
Group online game players into fair, low-latency matches within seconds, at millions of concurrent players.
Match riders with nearby drivers in seconds, track trips live, and price them, for millions of concurrent users worldwide.
Deliver push, email, SMS and in-app notifications to hundreds of millions of users: the right channel, once, on time, and never at 3 a.m.
Real-time collaborative editing: many cursors in one document, every keystroke converging to the same text, offline edits merged on reconnect.
Serve a large language model behind an API: queue the requests, batch them onto scarce GPUs, stream tokens back, and keep every accelerator busy without blowing the latency budget.
A Redis-like cache as a service: hundreds of nodes, terabytes of memory, sub-millisecond gets, and a cluster that survives losing a machine mid-request.
Fetch billions of pages a month politely, discover new links, skip duplicates, and keep the copy fresh without getting the crawler banned.
A distributed service that decides, in under a millisecond, whether a request from a client is allowed under its quota.
Keep a folder identical on every device: upload huge files in resumable chunks, push only what changed, and reconcile two machines that both edited the same file offline.
Sell 60 000 seats in ten minutes to a million people at once: hold a seat while someone pays, never sell it twice, and keep the site up when demand is a hundred times supply.
Suggest the top ten completions after every keystroke, in under fifty milliseconds, from what the world searched for in the last hour, without suggesting anything that gets you in the newspaper.
Count a million ad clicks a second, show advertisers a dashboard that is seconds behind, stop a campaign the moment its budget runs out, and be exactly right when the invoice is cut.
Run millions of cron jobs and one-off tasks on time across a fleet, exactly once each, and keep going when a worker dies halfway through one.
Match buy and sell orders in microseconds, in a strict and provable order, never lose a fill, and stay correct when the matching engine dies mid-trade.
One page per building block, written to be said out loud in an interview. Free to read.
The URL Shortener walkthrough is free with no account, and signing in unlocks one more. Every plan unlocks everything else, including what is added after you buy.
For one focused interview loop: every walkthrough and mock while it lasts.
A year for the price of three months. For prep that runs over months.
Every walkthrough and mock, and every question added later, for good.
Payments by Stripe. Cancel subscriptions any time from the billing portal; 7-day refund on a first purchase, under the refund policy.
A recorded system design interview between an interviewer and a strong candidate, played one turn at a time. You press Next, the candidate answers, and the whiteboard fills in as they talk: requirements, numbers, the API, then a design that gets fixed one bottleneck at a time, then the deep dives. At the key decisions it pauses and asks what you would say before showing what the candidate said.
A chat beside the interview, never part of it. Ask it anything about what you have seen so far (why this database, what a term means, whether your own idea would work) and it answers with the interview and the whiteboard in front of it. Each turn also comes with suggested questions whose answers are written in advance; those are free for everyone. Live questions are part of Pro.
You are the candidate. An AI interviewer runs the round the way a real one does: it states the problem, asks one thing at a time, probes what you said and what you drew on the whiteboard, and ends with a debrief (a score out of 100, what was strong, what was missing, and a note on each stage with a link to the same stage of the walkthrough).
Your choice at the start. Timed is interview conditions: a 45-minute clock the interviewer owns, and the coach is off. With the coach there is no clock and the coach sits beside you; it gives hints rather than answers unless you ask it outright, and the debrief says the round was coached.
The Design a URL Shortener walkthrough, with no account, including the pauses and the suggested questions. Sign in and you can pick one more walkthrough free. On a mock interview, anyone can hear the interviewer open the round. Everything else is Pro: every other walkthrough, live questions to the coach, and answering the interviewer.
Reading gives you the final answer. A walkthrough shows you how a strong candidate gets there out loud (the order, the pacing, the numbers, and the design being fixed one problem at a time) and lets you stop and ask why. The mock then makes you produce it yourself, under pressure, with someone following up on the weak part.
Every walkthrough, including every one added later; live questions to the coach, including comparing your answers with the candidate’s; AI mock interviews, timed or with the coach; and the company-style mock interviews. All three plans include the same thing; they differ only in how you pay.
Monthly and annual plans renew until you cancel. Cancel from the billing portal at any time and you keep access until the end of the period you paid for. Lifetime is a single payment with no renewal.
Yes. Open the billing portal from the pricing page and switch plans; Stripe prorates the unused part of the current period.
Yes, on a first purchase. Email us within 7 days of it, having gone through fewer than 3 Pro walkthroughs and started fewer than 3 mock interviews, and it is refunded in full. Renewals are not refundable, so cancel before the renewal date if you are done. The Terms have the details.
Not for the free walkthrough, and not to hear the AI interviewer open a round. Signing in with Google unlocks a second walkthrough of your choice, and is needed to buy Pro.
Public interview guides and candidate reports. They indicate where a question has been reported, not a verified dataset, and a company name never implies endorsement.
Senior and staff loops at large tech companies, where the interview is 45 to 60 minutes, expects numbers, and spends most of its time on deep dives. Mid-level candidates use it too; the walkthroughs explain every term as they go, and the coach will explain anything they do not.
One walkthrough is free with no account, and signing in unlocks a second of your choice. Pause at any turn and pick it up later.